"Oracle and IBM today announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment."

Java is used quite heavily in mobile, yes, both the "official" Java ME and Google's Dalvik variant (which has different but mappable operations in its virtual machine). You might have heard of those newfangled Blackberry and Android phones. ;-)

Java is also used *very* heavily for developing corporate applications, many of which use web clients but many of which use Java fat clients. Either way, the business logic layer is commonly Java. (It's illegitimate child C# is doing pretty well, too, or so I hear.) And, of course as mentioned elsewhere, Java is very popular for server-side web programming.

By the way, Java is back in the top spot this month on the TIOBE Programming Community Index (a ranking of programmer community interest in a language, more or less), after briefly being matched by C. The fastest rising languages, however, are Objective-C (used by Apple's iProducts), Python (my personal favorite), and C# (Steve Ballmer's personal favorite ;-).

By the way, Java is back in the top spot this month on the TIOBE Programming Community Index (a ranking of programmer community interest in a language, more or less), after briefly being matched by C. The fastest rising languages, however, are Objective-C (used by Apple's iProducts), Python (my personal favorite), and C# (Steve Ballmer's personal favorite ;-).

I wish people would stop mentioning the TIOBE index as the whole thing is really quite meaningless. All they do is google every programming language name and count the number of total hits. Hardly an accurate way to gauge interest in a language.

Bet THAT wish doesn't come true, especially since you don't offer a better alternative. Hint: There's not a generally more meaningful method of gauging interest in a computer language that's also practical to implement than a survey of query volumes across 6 major search engines AFAICT.

For example, lines of code written in each language in a given month might be more meaningful, but the only code an analyst can really see is open source, which wouldn't be very representative of general language interest at all. Sales of compilers might be interesting, but of course some of the best compilers are open source and so proprietary languages would be badly over-represented. Languages taught at major universities would be even worse, just a sheep counter in effect.

And the TIOBE results generally track well with other measures of general interest, as well as with a lot of us old timers' experiences.

So, TIOBE it is. As a general gauge of interest, it's all we've got, and frankly, it's not that bad as long as you're not placing major financial bets on the results.

In my more cynical moments I'd guess your favorite language doesn't elicit much search engine activity, so I'll concede for the record that it's "meaningless" and you shouldn't worry about it.